adminto Africa’s francophone west, democratic east and its southern tip.
Plans to visit Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania over the next week could be complicated, shifting the focus of a trip meant to ease the disappointment of Africans who saw expectations for Obama’s presidency fall short.
The White House has said that it will defer to Mandela’s family on whether the president would visit his ailing 94-year-old political hero in the Pretoria hospital where he has been for nearly three weeks.
And it has refused to say exactly what contingency plans are in place for the week-long trip, designed to highlight Africa’s emerging economic potential and growing middle class, as well as youth and health programmes.
South Africa’s Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said that while Obama would have loved to see Mandela, a meeting with the former South African leader would be impossible.
The men met in 2005, when the former South African president was in Washington, and Obama was a newly elected senator, and the two have spoken several times since by telephone.
But there has been no face-to-face meeting between the two since Obama was elected in 2008. — AFP.
Online Reporter